


In Screaming Color

by BearSpirit



Category: Frozen (2013), Once Upon a Time (TV), Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 10:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3064103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BearSpirit/pseuds/BearSpirit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a vacation to the supposedly deserted Enchanted Forest, Elsa and Anna come across something strange. Occurs after the events of "Heroes and Villains." Penny's character is based on her description in "To Catch a Thief."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Yep, this is definitely it! Elsa, welcome to Mist Haven.”

Arendelle’s queen was barely off the ship when Anna took off through the woods at a fast-paced jog. Her excitement to be back came as no surprise: their entire journey here Anna had been jabbering on about her various adventures in this land, coaching her on what they should do if they should run into Bo Peep (even though Elsa quietly tried to remind her that woman no longer lived in the Enchanted Forest), and hyperactively wondering about what all had changed in the thirty years she’d been frozen in Arendelle.

The land, though clearly curse-damaged, was certainly beautiful and strange compared with what she’d known her whole life. She only wished she could enjoy it, rather than have to worry about her sister running off.

“Anna! Anna, don’t go so fast. I can barely keep up with you as it is.”

“Sorry!” she gushed breathlessly as she circled back, her auburn braids flying behind her. “I’m just excited to be here again. With you! And it was such a long trip; I’m just grateful to be on dry land again!”

Elsa smiled in amusement at her sister’s enthusiasm. “Me too,” she conceded. “Now tell me, what region of the forest is this?” From Anna’s stories, she knew Mist Haven was a large enough land that it had been divided into many territories.

“I think this is Sherwood,” Anna replied inconclusively. “At least, that’s where I ended up first last time, and I think this place looks familiar. Then again, it has been thirty years, maybe I’m remembering wrong.”

“Anna,” Elsa chuckled, “You were _frozen_ for those thirty years. I’m sure your memory is fine.” 

“Okay, okay,” the princess smiled cheerfully. “Then this is Sherwood.” Her tone was more confident this time, masking the fact she still had no idea whether or not she was right. Leaving the guards and crew to man the ship, Anna and Elsa traveled further into the woods, eventually finding a cobblestone road and following it into a little town. 

“It’s a lot more… empty… than I remember,” Anna said as they reached the marketplace of what appeared to be a completely abandoned village. None of the houses gave any signs of life, and there wasn’t a soul in the streets. 

“It’s because of the curse,” Elsa explained with a curt nod of her head. “While Arendelle was frozen over, Snow White and the Evil Queen cast a curse that took them and everyone else to Storybrooke, so that they could find Emma and Henry, and defeat the Wicked Witch.”

“Wow,” Anna replied. “You might know more about Mist Haven than me, and you’ve never even been here before!”

Elsa grinned. “Yes, well, Emma and I had a lot of time to talk, while we were looking for you.”

Anna pouted. “Wait, you mean the conversation wasn’t always about me?” she whined in mock offense.

“Don’t worry Anna, we talked about you plenty. Tell me more about your adventures in Sherwood.”

“Oh, there isn’t that much to tell,” she went on cheerfully, doing her best not to get too far ahead of Elsa. “I was really just passing through to get to David and Ruth’s farm like Kristoff suggested.”

“Come on, you don’t have any stories about this place?”

“Mostly just gossip from the peasants,” Anna shrugged. “Apparently Wilma and Joseph were having an affair, even though they were both married-- huge scandal. And a couple nights before I got here, a group of bandits stole a lot of gold and jewelry from Princess Ella and her husband, Prince… Something-Or-Other. I remember Ella’s name because it sounds like Elsa. Doesn’t it? I mean, it is practically the same, just with no _‘sss’_ sound in the middle… Anyway, turns out the thieves gave everything they stole to the poor and needy, so I guess it all worked out in the end. The group is kinda infamous in these parts... well, infamous among the rich, famous among the poor...”

Elsa smiled pleasantly and successfully attempted to tune her sister out. She loved her and her ability to ramble on and on for hours, but sometimes it was a little overwhelming. They carried on through this village, stopping only a few times to gather supplies for their little vacation from shops along the way. By the time they’re reached the countryside, it was starting to get dark. 

Anna had finished her story a few minutes ago and was starting to run off in different directions with the curiosity and attention span of a puppy. She never ventured out of Elsa's eyesight though, and she always came back after a few minutes, so Elsa allowed it. 

“We should head back to shore soon, Anna!” Elsa called. “Or the guards will start to worry!” The plan had been that Elsa and Anna would spend the day scoping out the place, then return by the moon’s peak to spend the night in the cabins. In the morning, they were to set out again as a group, with Anna calling the shots as to where they ended up. 

But it was already dusk and Elsa saw no need to give the guards a heart attack, when it had been her who had insisted on spending the first day alone with her sister in the first place, despite their better judgement.

“Elsa! Come look at this lake!” Anna shouted back, evidently ignoring what she had said. 

Elsa sighed. “Anna, we have to go now! It’ll take us at least two hours to get back to the ship, if we hurry.”

“We can go in a minute; you have to see this!”

“The lake will be here tomorrow, Anna…”

“But Elsa,” the auburn-haired princess whispered as she trotted back towards her sister, her eyes shining in wonder. “It’s _frozen_.”

The queen frowned. Perhaps she hadn’t heard right; it almost sounded as though Anna had said the lake was frozen. She glanced around. It was supposed to be summer in the Enchanted Forest, and the air was warm- humid, even. There wasn’t any snow on the ground, the grass was green, and flowers were in full bloom. It was rather evident it hadn’t been cold- let alone below freezing- for months. “What?”

“Come look!”

Anna bolted off again, disappearing behind a crumbling little cottage that might have at one point in time been inhabitable. Not anymore: the roof had collapsed in and underbrush had risen up to cover most of the walls, doors and windows. Unable to resist, Elsa followed her sister behind the house to get a better look at the lake. She’d heard it right- the surface was frozen solid. How... _bizarre_. 

“Be careful!” she called out to Anna, who was now standing by the edge of the lake, looking in. Elsa hurried after her, and soon she was at her side, staring into the icy depths.

“Why do you think it hasn’t thawed yet?” the younger of the two asked. 

“I have no idea,” Elsa said, curiosity getting the better of her as she added, “But why don’t we find out?”


	2. Chapter 2

Elsa had been assuming the lake was being held in its frozen state by some unbendable magical force, so it came as a shock when it melted easily under her manipulation. Maybe the mysterious ice lake was weaker than she’d anticipated. Or maybe her powers were stronger than she thought. In any case, it looked as though whatever the reason was for the lake’s solid appearance would remain a mystery. Anna dipped a finger through the water, making little ripples with her fingertips. 

“Cold, but definitely liquid.”

“Huh.” Elsa raised her eyebrows. She was about to suggest heading back to the beach again when Anna, who had been staring out into the distance, did a double-take on the lake, her eyes bulging in disbelief. 

“Th- there’s someone in the water!” she exclaimed. 

Elsa creased her brow, raising her eyes to follow her sister’s gaze. Sure enough, floating in the middle of the lake, a body had risen out of the depths. 

“Elsa quick! We have to save her!”

Elsa turned to look at her sister with sympathetic eyes. There was no way that girl was still alive. “Anna…”

“Hang on, ma’am, I’m coming!” Without a second thought, Anna dove into the lake, her frantic legs splashing the queen in her haste to rescue the water-sogged body.

“ _Anna!_ ” Elsa shouted, concern and panic lacing her voice. To the best of her knowledge, Anna could swim, but the water was too cold to be healthy, and there was no telling what was in that lake. “Anna, there’s nothing you can do! Swim back here!” Elsa bit her lip anxiously, wondering if it would be of any help for her to jump in and swim after her crazy sister. But before she had gone through her options, Anna had swum out and back, the body in tow. 

Impossibly, the girl she'd dragged out of the water was still alive. 

She was blue, cold, and her lips were frosted, but her heart was still drumming away, loud as ever, underneath her frostbitten chest. She wasn’t breathing- at least, not at first. After Elsa pushed the water out of her lungs, though, she started to. They were just faint, shallow breaths, but she was definitely breathing. 

All of this was confusing and rather hard for Elsa to accept, but Anna didn’t seem to question it. “We need to get her some place warm. Like a house! With a fireplace!” 

Elsa shook her head to clear it and nodded. “Some… some of the houses in the marketplace looked comfortable,” she muttered.

“Right! Here, help me carry her.” To Anna's credit, she didn't complain about how cold and uncomfortably wet she must be right now- her attention was completely on the woman she had just saved.

Between the two of them, they were about to carry this girl, who looked about twenty-something or maybe a bit younger, back to the town and into one of the big houses, making sure it had a chimney first. 

“I’ll build a fire,” Anna chirped as they set the miracle woman down on the couch, quickly darting away to find some wood.

Elsa watched her go, then turned to look at the person they’d rescued with a sigh. Impossible? No, she supposed it wasn’t, though it was extremely improbable. Wanting to make herself useful, and seeing as the girl had begun to shiver, the blonde lifted a hand, turning the water droplets into little snowflakes so she could remove them as best she could from her skin and hair. As she did so, the woman groaned and shifted, her eyes blinking into focus as she started to wake up. 

Anna walked in before she had regained full consciousness, her arms piled high with firewood. “You’ll never believe it, but I found a whole stack of wood on some porch down the street. It all looked pretty dry and usable to me, but you’d better take a look, just to be su-” She broke off mid-sentence, staring at the girl who had sat up, gray eyes blinking around the room drowsily. 

“What happened?”

Elsa and Anna exchanged a look. “We… aren’t really sure,” Anna admitted after a moment.

“We found you in the lake,” Elsa added. “You were still breathing, so we brought you here to warm up.”

She took a moment to think this through, then tried to sit up a little straighter. “Where’s my brother?”

“No one’s been in Mist Haven for months, Miss. The lake was totally frozen over when we got here, with you underneath. My sister just un-froze it.”

“Un...froze?” the girl with the dirty blonde hair furrowed her brow and glanced unsurely at the blue-clad woman. 

“I have magic,” Elsa explained, sitting down near the shivering woman and resting a hand on her shoulder comfortingly. “We were only passing through, but it’s very likely that… somehow… you’ve been trapped under the ice for years. Decades, even.”

“That’s…” the woman glanced between the sisters, then scoffed, “that’s impossible.”

“What’s your name?” the queen pressed gently. 

“Where’s my brother?”

“What’s your name?”

_“Where’s my brother?”_

“How should I know that, if you won’t even tell me who you are?” Elsa snapped, suddenly impatient. She didn’t have much of a tolerance for the stubborn-minded. 

The queen was met with a sour glare that she evenly returned until finally her opponent gave up with a scowl. “My name is Penelope.”

Elsa nodded. “And your brother?”

“Will. Will Scarlet.”

“The book thief,” Elsa replied almost immediately with the nickname he had acquired among those in the Sheriff Station the day of his arrest.

“Book thief,” Penelope echoed, then shook her head, “I don’t know about that, but he'd be the snarky little guy with the weird haircut.”

“I didn’t know him very well, but I can tell you he’s alive, and…” the Queen of Arendelle trailed off. She was going to say ‘well,’ but she wasn’t sure that was the right word, considering his habitual alcoholism and knack for troublemaking. Not that that was the first thing she wanted to tell the girl who had just woken from a multi-decade ice nap. “...young,” she finished weakly. It was a justifiable contribution, Elsa reasoned: for as long as Penelope had been underwater, Will could very well be in his fifties by now.

Anna glanced between the two as a moment of awkward silence fell over them before turning back towards the pit she had made, rubbing her rocks together vigorously in an attempt to light the fire. 

“It isn’t possible,” Penelope repeated under her breath. Pitying her, Elsa tried to rub her shoulder in a comforting manner, but the girl who should be dead only growled and retaliated by shoving her away. Elsa twisted her jaw, attempting to keep her irritation in check. _A little gratitude would be nice_.

Finally getting a spark, she pressed a rock towards a log, and continued this pattern until she had managed to get a pitiful little fire going. “There! That was easy. And Kristoff said it took the hands of a mountain man,” she beamed a proud, triumphant smile, then turned to the others. “Do you think you can walk, Penny? I swear it’s gonna be a lot warmer over here.”

“Don’t call me that,” she answered bitterly. Out of the corner of her eye (for Elsa was too proud to look at her directly), Elsa could see her muscles tense in an attempt to get off the couch, but, unable to move her legs, tried to play it off as stubbornness. “I like it fine here.”

“Listen, Penn- _Penelope_ , I know all of this is a little hard to handle right now, and I’m sure I’d be grumpy too if I’d been through what you have, but you’re gonna get sick if you don’t warm up fast,” Anna coaxed.

In Elsa’s opinion, Penelope was probably going to get sick anyway. But it was nice of Anna to try, and extremely inconsiderate of Penelope not to appreciate that. 

“I said I like it here.”

Her lip curled in anger and she turned to speak to Penny, her voice calm and severe. “When I melted the ice, _Anna_ was the one that saw you. She was the one who saved you. I thought you were dead, I was going to leave you in there, but she jumped into the water and rescued you before I had the time to blink. So you can talk to me however you want, but if you don’t show her some respect, I will toss you right back where you came from and freeze the lake over again myself. Understood?”

Penelope narrowed her eyes at being lectured, but evidently the words sunk in, because eventually she lowered her gaze guiltily. “I guess I didn’t… thank you for that, did I?”

“You can thank me by warming up by this fire.”

“About that…”

“She can’t walk, Anna,” Elsa finished for her. She rose to her feet, then tilted her head and eyed the girl again warily. “Mind if I pull you up?”

Penelope sighed, then nodded in consent. “I wouldn’t.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Will!” the little girl of barely thirteen whispered into her sleeping brother’s ear. She tapped on his shoulder, gently at first, then harder when he didn’t respond. “Willie!”

It was still dark outside, barely dawn, but Penelope was wide awake, as usual. This was something, the rest of the household hoped, that she would outgrow when she hit puberty. 

She tried everything: slapping his face, banging on his chest… she even went so far as to lick the inside of his ear- recoiling at the bitter taste of what she thought must be earwax. No response. With a new resolve, she backed away from her brother’s bed and cleared her throat. Stiff as a board, she shouted in a clear, clipping voice that mimicked her mother’s: “William Jacob Scarlet! Wake up this instant, or I’ll-”

“I’m up, I’m up,” Will muttered as he sat up, eyes still blurry. Penelope giggled. Realizing what she’d done, he groaned and flopped back onto his pillow. “Get out of my room, Penny.”

“It’s only your room because everyone else is already up,” she pointed out. It was true: the three of them-- Will, Penny, and their mother-- all slept in the living area, since there were only two sections of the cottage. One room for cooking, one room for everything else. 

“Where’s mum?”

“She left an hour ago.”

“Why?”

“Tilly wanted her to come in early, that’s why. Now get up! You said we could go out on the ice today!”

“Five more minutes.” 

“You already made me wait two days! And you said we could go out _first thing_ this morning.” 

“Why the bloody hell would I say that?”

“Please, Will…”

Penny counted the seconds, slowly and patiently in her head. One… two… three… four… 

Before she had gotten to five, Will muttered a series of curses under his breath and rolled over. He threw back his blanket and got out of bed to put on some warmer clothes, shooting his sister a glare as he passed her. She smiled victoriously. Will was the closest thing to a paternal figure she had, since their father had disappeared when she was a baby, and she had long since learned that begging and batting her eyelashes were reliable ways to get him to do what she wanted. 

In no time at all, the pair were out of the cottage and heading towards the lake, the frosty grass crunching under their feet. 

They slipped and skidded clumsily on the ice and soon enough they were both laughing and making fools of themselves. “Tell you what,” Penny said as she picked herself up from a rough fall, dusting herself off hastily. “I bet I can go out further than you.” 

“You’re on,” her brother agreed. And so their competition went: Penelope would take as big a step away from the shore as she could, then Will, and so on until Will heard the ice snap under his feet and backed down. “I’m too heavy, I’ll break it if I go any further.”

“Wimp,” Penelope teased. She laughed gleefully. “Four years younger and I already beat you at everything!”

“You don’t beat me at _everything_ ,” Will protested. 

“Almost everything,” she replied, and as if to punctuate her point, she walked further towards the center of the lake. Underneath her feet, the ice groaned and bent to accommodate her weight. Will heard it and raised his eyebrows in mild alarm. 

“Be careful, the ice out there won’t be as strong.”

“It’s been frozen over for three days, of course it’s thick enou-” Just then, there was a loud cracking sound and without warning there was nothing stopping her from plunging into the icy depths below. She heard her brother shout her name before her head was underwater and suddenly everything was gone.

Penelope woke up in the little guest bedroom with a start, her body covered in goosebumps and her breathing shallow and shaky. Sunlight was pouring in through the window: she had slept in today.

She rolled over and got up, walking on unsteady, slightly numb legs over to the mirror, staring at herself with a dumbfounded expression. _But I grew up…_

And so she had. Her young, thirteen-year-old face had hardened. Her rosy, baby cheeks, though still a little pink from the aftermath of being frozen in a lake for years, had slimmed and matured. Her big blue eyes had dimmed and sunken further into their sockets, and her yellow hair had darkened considerably. She was taller, and the development in her chest area was a clear indication that she had indeed undergone puberty. 

The strangest thing of all was, she remembered it happening. She remembered walking away from the lake that day, still picking on her brother for worrying about the ice being too thin. She remembered going home and eating dinner with her mother. She remembered that Will had spent his money from working at the bakery to buy them enough meat to last through the week. She remembered getting older. Does this mean... was all of that... were her memories of growing up some kind of... _dream?_ A hallucination she'd had under the ice? But it had all been so vivid...

Even as she had this epiphany, the memories she had from that day at the lake onwards grew blurrier, in the way dreams often do the longer you're awake. Frantically, she looked around the room, trying to find a piece of parchment or something similar to write everything down before she forgot.

_I grew up… inside my head?_


End file.
